The Minstrel Show Revisited: Dance review by Helen Shaw
In 1991, choreographer Donald Byrd'sThe Minstrel Show was daring. Is it still? Daring yes; riveting—less so. In The Minstrel Show Revisited, Byrd responds to recent tragedies by adding docudrama-style verbatim material about both Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, expanding the show's running time to nearly three hours. The piece's engine can't sustain such a long drive, and despite Byrd's own delightful presence, the transgressive energies wind down by evening's end.
Certainly, even 25 years later, some of the old electricity does still crackle. A quarter century of artists repurposing racist caricature (Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Ann Liv Young) hasn't weakened the horror we feel at seeing blackface onstage. As before, Byrd uses this discomfort as a galvanizing force.There's awkward audience participation, in which Byrd trains volunteers to be Bones and Tambo in a minstrelsy routine; performers wear shoeblack faces and white-painted grins, dancing like demented puppets to Scott Joplin and shrieking with awful laughter.
Byrd's company The Group is long disbanded—he has revived his work at his new home, the Seattle-based Spectrum Dance Theater, whose dancers have commitment, though not always the necessary pyrotechnics. This may be why Byrd's "revisitation," largely in the second half, settles the dancers into folding chairs, where two performers read aloud from relevant transcripts—George Zimmerman's 911 call and a deposition by Darren Wilson. Here, the show, already feeling long, sputters to a halt. But despite the show's longueurs, you may still something glinting within. If you look carefully, you'll why the work was groundbreaking. You'll see why it was necessary, why it was great.—Helen Shaw
Skirball Center at NYU. Choreographed by Donald Byrd. 2hrs 45mins. One intermission.